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Comment on The Secret Guild of Silicon Valley (2012)parent

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For starters most real C coders do in fact know all other languages. your typical python coder (cause yeah, PHP is kinda dead) can't do that. he can't fix the server software thats in C either.

You must know very different "typical python coders" than I do. Almost every Pythonista I know or look up to knows at least some C, at least enough to write Cython, and usually enough to write idiomatic C. As you allude to, we often have to when we need to optimize CPU-bound code.

Almost the only exception to this are the coders I know who are just starting to program. But almost anyone who stays active in Python will eventually learn some C, if they don't already know it.

some C doesnt mean "know C"

do you know how the memory allocation works when you create a list in python by inferring from how you'd do it in C?

its a very basic question and I don't know many python devs that know the answer right off the bat. its going to be "u malloc stuff right?"

Another basic question: what happens exactly when you open and start reading a file? "u call open right?"

thats not enough to figure out how things work. Coding "real" C (as in being able to do anything in C, not just code snippets) means that you probably understand how most things work under the hood, including libc, the kernel(s), file system, etc - at a pretty good level of detail.

If you know many like that, its great, but if you think the majority (or even a third) know these things - then I also think that either you or I live in an imaginary world =p

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